Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Greater New Orleans

Change Region

comments

Scalawag French clerk stars in New Orleans exhibit and long lost historic text

HNOC Company Man art.jpg

This 18th century watercolor from "Relation du Voyage de la Louisianne ou nouvelle France" by Marc-Antoine Caillot, shows ships gathered at the mouth of the Mississippi.
(Historic New Orleans Collection)

Interested in Mardi Gras whoopee, stock market bubbles, loose women and the slave trade in colonial New Orleans? Then get to the Historic New Orleans Collection for the free exhibit, “Pipe Dreams: Louisiana under the French Company of the Indies, 1717-1731.”

Yep, it’s a scholarly show, full of 18th century maps and artwork, trade goods from the period, and archeological artifacts from New Orleans, Natchez, and other Gulf South locations. To assemble the exhibit, historian Erin M. Greenwald called in loans from a dozen museums and archives in the United States and Europe.

But the star of the show is a scalawag Frenchman that Greenwald met when she joined the Historic New Orleans Collection in 2007.

“When I saw the draft translation of Caillot’s account in 2007, I was stunned,” Greenwald said. “Here was an amazing primary source document that no other historian had touched. It’s a very rare thing for scholars to have this kind of material fall into their laps.”

Greenwald promptly changed her doctoral-thesis-in-progress (rare behavior from an aspiring academic) and plunged into research on the Caillot document. To prove the authenticity of the manuscript, she traveled to archives in France, Canada and the United States, and probed the history of the document with auction house representatives and others who had seen the 300-year-old text pass through their hands.

Greenwald was never able to confirm the identity of the most recent seller, but she was able to sketch a provenance for the document and corroborate many details of the text -- enough to prove to skeptical historians that the HNOC had acquired another key documents from the city’s history.

“Scholars drool over the riches that New Orleans already has in its many archives -- and Caillot’s account is a big addition,” Greenwald said. “It came to light at a time when Louisiana has become a much more important subject for historians. In the past, it was hard to get a job or get taken seriously if you wrote about this part of the U.S. History was very much about the Anglo-centric east coast. Now we’re appreciated for our differences and our connections to the Caribbean and South America.”

You can view Caillot’s manuscript when the HNOC exhibit opens on June 18 -- and scan through a complete digital version while visiting the galleries.

In crisp, clerkly script, Caillot recorded his impressions of the two month overseas trip to New Orleans; his arrival at the mouth of the Mississippi (where he helped to unload slaves for the upriver trip in small boats); and his days in the swampy colonial capital where efforts to create a profitable tobacco economy were already floundering.

Caillot was happy to get to New Orleans, however, especially after the eight-day upriver boat ride.

“We were done with the war, plague, and famine we had faced during this little trip,” Caillot wrote. “War, because it had been necessary for us to have stick in hand to keep the Negroes under control; plague, for the stench that the scurvy-ridden people had given us; and famine, because as a rule we had nothing to eat.”

In New Orleans, he worked in a compound of new buildings known as “la Direction,” which took up a city block bounded by Chartres, St. Peter, and Toulouse Streets and the riverfront quay. His job gave him access to reports and documents from across Louisiana, and his account reflects his knowledge of events in Natchez and other outposts across the sprawling territories claimed by France – and controlled by Native American tribes.

One day, while walking on the levee with friends, Caillot witnessed the arrival of wounded French refugees who had drifted downriver from Natchez in a pirogue. The 1729 uprising of the Natchez Indians proved devastating to tobacco production – and further eroded Louisiana’s prospects, especially among French investors. Louisiana was seen as unsafe, inhospitable, and corrupt – a place already associated with the speculative stock scheme of John Law, which had triggered the first Europe-wide financial collapse in 1720.

Caillot and the Company of the Indies soon pulled out of Louisiana. But Caillot had plenty of fun before he left. His account provides a thorough record of his pursuit of women. It also includes his description of crashing a Bayou St. John wedding with a party of Carnival revelers. Caillot himself was in drag, with his chest shaved, his breasts plumped and beauty marks on his face.

Greenwald confirmed Caillot’s Mardi Gras story by tracking down records of the wedding that still exist in church records.

“Caillot makes everything about the period feel more tangible – and that’s the fun part of working with a manuscript like this,” Greenwald said. “The longer I looked through the records, the more connections I found in everything from ship registers to tax rolls. And those individual details all enrich the broader picture. Caillot is a huge piece in the puzzle of New Orleans history.”

Pipe Dreams: Louisiana under the French Company of the Indies, 1717-1731

What: An exhibition of 18th century maps, artwork, trade goods, and archeological artifacts from the Gulf South that centers on a long-lost manuscript by a Frenchman who traveled to New Orleans in 1729. The translated manuscript was recently published as “A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies,” (HNOC, $40).